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Netflix CEO Accuses Comcast of Not Practicing Net Neutrality
braindrainbahrain writes "Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, has a Facebook page in which he posts a short gripe about Comcast. It seems watching video through the Xfinity app on an Xbox does not counting towards your cap on your Comcast data plan. All other services, Netflix included, do. To quote Hastings: 'For example, if I watch last night's SNL episode on my Xbox through the Hulu app, it eats up about one gigabyte of my cap, but if I watch that same episode through the Xfinity Xbox app, it doesn't use up my cap at all. The same device, the same IP address, the same wifi, the same internet connection, but totally different cap treatment. In what way is this neutral?'"
The difference, of course, is that you need a Comcast cable TV subscription in order to have the Xfinity app not count toward your monthly data usage allowance. Then again, you can't exactly sign up for a similar plan through Netflix or Hulu.
Why isn't netflix working????? I can say why .......
(we have comcast too)
That is, eager to complain about - and pay to eliminate - regulations and laws meant to protect the consumer as a danger to "the free market" and "competition" while being equally eager to eliminate "the free market" and "competition".
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Not entirely true. The bulk of the costs are the last mile (which remains the same whether it's Comcast or Netflix doing the streaming). Internet transit costs almost nothing these days, especially at the commit levels that a large carrier like Comcast has...
Seems the relevant point is that your cable TV wouldn't normally be part of your data plan, even though it's all delivered digitally now anyways.
But I'd say they're obviously working this angle to ease us into accepting their view of how isp's networks should work... Netflix pays Comcast extra, behind the scenes, for the luxury of being able to deliver video to their customers.
That way your Netflix will cost you twice what it does or you'll be more likely to use comcast's video services... a win-win for them, and all-around bad for Netflix and the customers.
It violates antitrust laws. Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services should just sue Comcast and get it over with it.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
We don't have the $1 mil to make them pay attention to us, that's why.
The bandwidth used to get the data from comcasts servers is only transmitted across comcasts network and doesn't consume upstream bandwidth from peering connections so I would argue that the xfinity data isn't really "internet" traffic at all. It's like arguing that one apartment watching a tv show stored on a server in an apartment complex should be counted as consumed internet bandwidth to the upstream connections.
In my area, Comcast uses DNS Hijacking to favor their "search engine" any time you misspell something in the url bar. Sounds like more of the same to me. 21st century highwaymen.
From strictly a technology perspective, there is a difference - IPTV delivered via Multicast can be engineered to reduce bandwidth consumption, and will not be counted as usage by your ISP. If delivered via Unicast, such as Netflix or Youtube, it looks just like every other packet. That is, unless you want your ISP performing DPI to bill you properly based on what you're watching instead of where it's coming from...? Which is more "neutral" - DPI or discrimination by packet type?
It's been said here before, these people are for the free market until they're not. When the free market turns against them they don't "innovate," they instantly go whining to their favorite congress person with a moneybag in their hand.
It's the same for everyone that claims to be "free market." There isn't one truly free market person in Congress on in Corporate America. Whenever you hear that it should cause your B.S. detector to go off.
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side. You could be arguing that it travels less far, because the data already resides on Comcast's network (Hulu being sponsored/owned/controlled in part by Comcast), but that has nothing to do with bandwidth, and all to do with.... wait for it... Net Neutrality. In one case, the same packets (assuming the very same file exists on both Netflix and on Hulu), are traveling through the Comcast network, with an endpoint in a Comcast controlled network. In the other case, it is traveling through the Comcast network with an endpoint outside of the Comcast controlled network.
This is EXACTLY what Net Neutrality is about it.
And this is EXACTLY what everybody has been screaming bloody murder about since the ISPs got in bed with content, and since ISPs became big enough to be monopoly/duopoly providers. This exact beehavior was predicted by a number of people, and it will end in
* Internet access that works exactly like cable channel access
* a death sentence for any site that isn't paying off the ISPs to be on a special access program
Welcome to the future Internet. It's called TV.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I made a comment some months about how this will happen, as the reason why isp's are rolling out bandwidth limits and creating artificial scarcity. most(all) of the isp's doing this have such services of their own and this is an easy way to create incentive to use those services and not competing services. for the consumer it sucks bigtime of course - and the big isp's doing this have no incentive to upgrade their services to higher bandwidths since it works as a method to drive users towards their own services, which even if they don't make money(for the isp) surely count against somebodys bonus matrix plans(which are bullshit of course too).
this is the reason why they don't want net neutrality, why they don't want uncapped connections. they just want to promote their walled garden bullshit services. content providers don't mind as it let's them "monetize" the shows in the old fashion - meaning lots of regional licensing and their staff sitting at bullshit lunches getting hammered while selling something the consumer should be able to buy/view globally directly.
they should at least be forced to advertise the fact and be forced to advertise their internet connections as comcast-network connections.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The NET in Net Neutrality implies Internet. When comcast is delivering you a Netflix/Hulu/Vudu etc. stream, they're pulling it from the open Internet to deliver it to you. When you're using their app, the can deliver the same content completely over their own network. You're not using the Internet, you're using Comcast's WAN, so no Internet bandwidth is being used, so it shouldn't be charged. If I'm streaming a movie from my PC to my TV, it doesn't go against my cap either, because it's using my isolated network, not the Internet.
Ok, I'll bite - I don't get one thing... I pay Comcast an obscene amount of money every month for Cable TV and Internet... why should they give a flying crap if I stream a show or not then? After all, I'm already paying for their Xfinity streamy stuff even if I don't take advantage of it.
I never even come close to my cap every month, but I'm still bothered by how a cap == "unlimited" and I don't understand why Comcast would care since they got the money anyway.
Oh, right - Capitolism now requires that every cporprate entity take the greediest possible short term position on any issue.
Grumble...
The Digital Sorceress
It seems watching video through the Xfinity app on an Xbox does not counting towards your cap on your Comcast data plan.
"All your cap are belong to us"?
Everybody click on all the ads so that Slashdot can afford a proofreader.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
"why should two different apps that probably have two totally different delivery mechanisms"
Actually having used Comcasts service, it streams the Hulu feeds through their own Xfinity web app. So essentially the Xfinity web app is a wrapper for Hulu for paid cable customers. In fact if its a show that appears on both, the Hulu feed is likely to be faster as its not going through 2 different gateways to get to you. I have tested this myself with numerous network shows. I only realized this after a redirect was screwed up and it showed the stream was coming from Hulu, NOT Xfinity.
"Apples to oranges."
Nope the last mile is the last mile no matter what. 0s and 1s don't change just because you use a different service. Maybe get a better understanding of streaming media and understand that the ONLY reason they are doing this has nothing to do with the costs associated, but everything to do with making people THINK there are different costs associated when in reality there are not.
Its lying to the government/customers enough to completely obliterate the fact that they are in reality a utility and should be regulated and beaten into submission as such. Hell Comcasts whole plan to produce "original content is all a elaborate scheme to convince people they are more than what they are, a utility. But making a company not screw customers and not scheme and violate basic civil and federal laws "would be communist."
Our forfathers are rolling in their graves at just how much the rich control this country now.
Besides, the majority of bandwidth cost to the home is the last mile. The long haul is cheap. In this respect, the difference in cost between streaming from the nearest comcast datacenter vs. the nearest netflix datacenter should be close to the same.
This statement makes no sense. The "high bandwidth service" in question in Netflix, Comcast has no say in where this service is located. Unless you mean the high bandwidth service is Xfinity, in which case it is already located within the Comcast network. The fact is, Comcast, and all other ISPs, are being forced to pay significantly more in peering costs due to the massive amount of bandwidth being used by Netflix. Services like Xfinity never leave the Comcast network, so they have no impact on peering agreements.
Now, I fully support Net Neutrality, but situations like this highlight how difficult it is in practice. If Xfinity were to count against usage caps, yes it would be more "fair" in theory. But the fact is, those bandwidth caps are a reflection of the costs of peering agreements, and Netflix raises those costs significantly while Xfinity does not raise them at all, so treating them the same would mean that Xfinity would be indirectly subsidizing Netflix, its direct competitor. The fact is, Hastings doesn't really want Xfinity to count against the cap, he wants Netflix to not count against the cap, a position that is pretty difficult to justify.
Data from Comcast to customer is half the bandwidth compared to data from Netflix to Comcast to customer.
Comcast is both a provider of internet services and a provider of content. What it is doing is bundling its services together to gain an unfair market advantage. It's the same kind of monopolistic practice that Microsoft got sued by, er... every country it does business within. The legal precident here is obvious, as is the conclusion. Whether you call it net neutrality or not, Comcast is doing something unethical and probably illegal as well.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
The FCC has remarkably little enforcement capability. Likely, the goal was to name & shame in the most publicly visible way possible, so Netflix could gain some traction on this issue quickly, instead of having to wait around for months for the FCC to do anything useful.
"When the free market turns against them"
Actually, that's never happened. There's never been a free global communications market.
Infrastructure, and those running it, are regulated and taxed/subsidized at different levels at different times, markets, and media.
And not lodge a complaint with the FCC or his local congresscritter (maybe over an expensive dinner)?
One man, even with a loud voice, isn't going to make much of a difference. By posting it on Facebook he's hoping to stir the pot and get others up in arms about the unfair nature of this special treatment.
Use Comcast's $60/month service or use Netflix, break your cap, and get service terminated. It's anti-competitive, and Comcast doesn't offer Netflix the ability to host on their network for the same savings. I fail to see any savings being passed onto the customers, rather just a blatant money grab.
Way back when I had ADSL in australia as my internet traffic within the ISPs network didn't count to my quota. The ISP had a bunch of ftp mirrors, a bunch of game servers, and the subscribers ran a bunch of not legitimate at all P2P servers/clients that restricted to within the ISP IPs.
It had nothing to do with the ISP trying to leverage itself into having an edge over content providing competitors. That external traffic was a big part of their costs and so encouraging their users to use their mirrors and so on was good for them.
When I was at uni, AARNet traffic was cheaper than other national traffic which was cheaper than international traffic - in terms of what the university charged the department for their usage. I can't find any docs now of course, but a different university still has a slightly simpler but similar setup: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/its/quotas/internet/definition.html
Again that wasn't the university trying to get content providers to pay them or trying to give an edge to themselves. It was just a reflection of the costs.
Now the US has far lower costs to start with and maybe they are low enough that it really doesn't matter and comcast are just trying to benefit their other business arms. But without knowing some of the vague details I don't think you can just ignore the non-jerk potential reasons.
So how can competitors get in on this "in-network doesn't count towards bandwidth cap" thing? They can't? So since I have no other choices on my ISP, why then would anyone but Comcast want something like this to be legal? Tweak bandwidth cap to 50GB/month and then laugh as people are required to use your services else have internet services terminated. It would appear this is incredibly simple to abuse to force out any competition.
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side.
Nope. I've seen the magical compression on Comcast's side and it doesn't come as dust. It usually arrives in big, slow-moving blocks.
Nope the last mile is the last mile no matter what. 0s and 1s don't change just because you use a different service. Maybe get a better understanding of streaming media and understand that the ONLY reason they are doing this has nothing to do with the costs associated, but everything to do with making people THINK there are different costs associated when in reality there are not.
People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But but but bandwidth is free! If Akamai were going to earn $1 billion a year from moving data around surely they are doing it by hand-delivering DVDs to consumers thus reducing the last-mile cost! Oh, wait, that's a different company.
This is one element of a much larger campaign. Who better to hit up (than your installed base) than the mobs at FB?
One man with a command of social media can indeed make a difference. The problem is that Netflix shot itself in the foot before, whizzing off their customer base, and they have part of that image to overcome.
My hopes? Somebody listens and makes Comcast become the neutral transport that they're supposed to be. Comcast will fight this tooth and nail; they will NOT roll over easily as they have the same "we own the wires" mentality that the rest of the once public utilities have.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Not to mention these same entities sing the exact opposite tune when they need protection from piracy and duplication of content by the dangerous consumers. They LOVE regulations and laws then.
This space intentionally left blank.
When they transitioned to DNSSEC validating resolvers for all customers, they dropped the "Domain Helper" service as they viewed it as fundamentally incompatible with DNSSEC validation.
If you are still seeing such behaviors, check which DNS resolver you are actually using, its likely to be OpenDNS or another third party service.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Assuming that to be true (it isn't) then half is still not zero. If you're going to calculate cost as "sum of all fractions of pipe consumed end-to-end", that would be fair and neutral -- if it was done for everyone by the same metric, even it ended up biasing one source over another. (Neutral simply means that everyone has the same rule applied equally - ie: it is equitable - it does NOT mean all providers are equal. Just as in science or in news, equitability and equal standards are FAR more important than equal share.)
Comcast isn't being equal OR equitable. It's making sources you buy from it essentially zero network cost and all other sources much more expensive. It's leveraging the (rather obvious) monopoly it has over its network to create a second, independent monopoly in the completely different field of content delivery. That's not ok. That's actually blatantly illegal. It also knows that in an election year where markets are jittery and unemployment is high, nobody is going to do a damn thing about it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Which in theory shouldn't be a problem. To get to use the Xfinity service you need a tv cable subscription so you have to pay extra to Comcast. Presumably to pay the cost of the extra bandwidth consumption. In a way, Comcast --the tv cable company-- has to pay Comcast --the ISP-- to deliver its content. The question then is, does Comcast --the tv cable company-- pay less for badwidth than would Netflix, Youtube, Vimeo, etc?
Net Neutrality is at its heart, a problem of anti-trust, of monopoly abuse, of a corporation using its power in one market to further another market.
But... the future refused to change.
When you're buying wholesale bandwidth it's per second and not on total transfer. You can max out the commit 24/7 and pay the same amount as never using it. The only reason dedicated server / VPS companies charge you on transfer is to make extra money. You'll also notice that some will give you a crazy amount of transfer. That's because it normally doesn't cost them anything more if you transfer 1 meg over their line or 1 gig.
"Ubuntu" -- an African word, meaning "Slackware is too hard for me". - stolen from Dan C alt.os.linux.slackware
At a certain point the peerage costs would be equal or greater to just going to the big content providers (Netflix, Youtube, etc) had having them host a cached version on the internal Comcast network that Comcast subscribers would hit first before trying to go out over a peered link (which should then not count against the cap since it's internal).
Since they're not doing that but directly trying to drive customers to the Comcast Xfinity and away from being paying customers of their competition (both in services and in content). They've kind of crossed a line methinks.
People seem to like the idea that "bandwidth is next to free" and the cost is only in the last mile, and for all intents and purposes it has gotten very cheap compared to years gone by but if it were free (or somewhere approaching free) then explain to me how CDNs are a multi-billion dollar a year business, please. Surely it can't be that network operators at the national level are interested in optimizing traffic (in the name of reducing costs) by moving the content closer to the consumer, can it? But but but bandwidth is free! If Akamai were going to earn $1 billion a year from moving data around surely they are doing it by hand-delivering DVDs to consumers thus reducing the last-mile cost! Oh, wait, that's a different company.
First: Akamai: they make lots of money to improve the user experience and lower the resource load on servers, nothing more, nothing less. Having worked at companies that have used Akamai and served 10s of thousands of concurrent users, I can definitely tell you what happens when, say, Akamai goes down at an inconvenient time - load spikes at your datacenter can go up 1000-fold or more, as your servers struggle to serve all those images marketing thought so nifty to include everywhere, resulting in lots of slow page loads, dropped connections, and unhappy customers. The cost of hosting enough hardware to serve the need yourself is far greater than using a service like Akamai, especially since it usually isn't a constant need.
What's the difference in cost of sending one packet across a network vs 1000?
Bandwidth is next to free, as long as you haven't saturated the connection. Once that occurs, the connection will need to be upgraded or otherwise expanded to be able to carry more data. At that point, there's an infrastructure cost. But otherwise, the costs are relatively constant, since the network doesn't shut down merely because no one's using it.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
So if comcast asks why I'm paying for one subscription but sharing my cable connection with the neighbors I can tell them, "don't worry, it's not going over your network"?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well keep in mind, when people talk about "the free market", they're not always talking about the same thing. It all depends on whose perspective your looking from, and who you think should be "free" in the market. Is a "free market" the market where *customers* are free, in that they are permitted to choose freely between different vendors of different products, based on the quality of those products? Or is a "free market" a market where the *vendors* are free, in that they are permitted to manipulate the market in any way that they're able, including fraud and monopolization?
When Comcast says they want a "free market", they're talking about the second one, where vendors are free.
Except it's not one man, it's a large corporation with a lot of employees, customers, and general name recognition. This is exactly the reason they formed a PAC...
http://slashdot.org/submission/2014593/netflix-forms-a-pac
In capitalism it's Man Exploits Man.
In Soviet Russia, it's just the opposite.
The only reason dedicated server / VPS companies charge you on transfer is to make extra money.
No, it's because you're line sharing with their other customers and they need a way to amortize the cost of the line. Available bandwidth doesn't translate well to small, individual customers, so they approximate based on data transfer... much like a cable company does, except the cable company hits you on both ends (speed and cap).
To get to use the Xfinity service you need a tv cable subscription so you have to pay extra to Comcast. Presumably to pay the cost of the extra bandwidth consumption.
So let's eliminate the presumption then, and just have them do the accounting: Don't exempt Xfinity from the bandwidth cap. And if that means Comcast will give you a discount on TV service to compensate for the extra money you're paying for internet service, great. But it also makes them feel the pain they're causing to third parties with their ridiculously low caps, when customers start cancelling their TV service because it uses up too much overpriced data.
So buy your pro-corporate definition, the old Sugar Trust would not be unethical.
Perhaps the oil and steel trusts weren't unethical either...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Unless something changed since the last time /. posted about this Xfinity/Comcast topic, people are simply not reading the documentation on Comcast regarding this.
The FAQ at Comcast stated a few things.
First, you must have Comcast cable box service already at the location.
Second, the programming you have access to through the Xbox is the same as or a subset of the programming you have access to through the on demand service with Comcast.
Effectively, it turns your xbox into another cable box for on demand programming. Instead of paying Comcast to have a cable box in your living room and another one in your kid's bedroom, you can force your kid to use on demand through xfinity on his/her xbox. Your kid does not get anything through the xbox that you cannot get on your cable box in the living room.
Programming that is not available on the cable box on demand service supposedly counts against your cap. The only programming that is supposedly exempt is the stuff that is on the cable box.
The only time this is really a net neutrality issue is if the xbox delivers content that the cable service does not - and does not count against your bandwidth cap.
It doesn't matter whether the product is a 'necessity of life'. If they're using bundling or similar behavior to gain a market advantage, then their activity is illegal. Sure, we're not going to drop dead as a result of Comcast's behavior, but 'consumer activism' as a solution isn't enough. We need regulation with actual teeth, and (IMHO) a corporate death penalty that will actually force companies to do the right thing. They've proven time and time again that they sure as hell won't do it themselves.
My best deal is at a $1/meg for transit
Netflix has several million simultaneous streaming users, and I'd say it is likely Comcast at least has one million simultaneous Netflix streams. 1 million x 1 mbps = 10 Tbbps.
Do you have a 10 Tbps router? Do you know how much that costs? Maintenance?
And of course it isn't one big 10 Tbps router, but actually thousands of routers distributed across thousands of head-ends, along with all the monthly local-loop charges for each of those head-ends. And some of these cable head-ends are pretty far away from major POPs.
"There isn't a single market in the world that has zero barrier of entry, perfect competition, perfectly rational consumers, and so on"
Nor is there a single dictionary or encyclopedia in the world that defines "free market" in those absolute terms.
I think of a "free market" as a marketplace where the rules are uniform, and exist to enforce honesty and efficiency rather than favoritism and dominion.
"There's no such thing as a free market."
There's no such thing as a free country either. Doesn't mean we have to hate the concept.